


Touch, Unbidden.

by lethifolde



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: (well sort of), Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Romance, Warming Up Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-09
Updated: 2018-01-09
Packaged: 2019-03-02 14:05:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13319718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lethifolde/pseuds/lethifolde
Summary: In which Simon learns to touch. In which Simon learns to feel.





	Touch, Unbidden.

When he was alive, the first time around, Simon was rarely touched. 

He would kiss his mother on the cheek each night, perhaps a handshake with his father on birthdays. Affection was not in the Monroe family's nature, nor closeness, nor sharing, nor tradition outside of church on Sundays. He saw classmates grimace, wipe away the kisses their parents planted on them at the schoolyard gates, siblings hold hands on the walk home from school, teammates run and hug and jump on each other at the end of a lunchtime match. He observed; he wondered what it would feel like, never brave enough to find out.

As a teenager, when movie theatre fumblings became the norm, Simon started to understand touch. It was a means to an end, rough and awkward and tinged in shades of pink cheeks, but he could find a reason for it, a point to it. In the back rows of movie theatres, behind the trees of public parks, with shaking hands and messy kisses, he would get himself off with others, first the girls that swooned at his big dark eyes, said there was something so _mysterious_ about him. Then, later, fifteen or sixteen, angry, toothy kisses with the captain of the rugby team, all muscle and strong lines, hard up against the changing room walls, biting down on each other's lips when they came. Diplomatic arrangements, tit for tat; all Simon learned was the importance of give and take, that the goal of touch was self-satisfaction. 

Fast-forward, university, the first year spent with his nose in books, finally the freedom of being out of home, of talking all the ideas he thought were nonsense to classmates who listen. He keeps his hands to himself, though, until the night after exams are finished, a party at his residence. That's where he meets the boy with the big brown eyes and a hoodie in the midst of an Irish heatwave, who tastes like beer and tobacco when he kisses Simon, pressing his tongue deep into Simon's mouth. 

After that, there's hands, everywhere, and after that, a joint passed between them. It carries on like that for a few weeks, fucking and not speaking, until Simon realises the boy is a drug dealer, is offered a sample of the wares for his silence. He's a student, isn't one to turn away anything that is free. Simon watches the boy prepare the hit with careful, steady hands, the touch of fingertips in the curve of his elbow.

Touch leads to bliss; touch leads to total oblivion. 

Living on the streets, a few years on, once his parents don't recognise him anymore and he avoids reflective surfaces enough he never has to recognise himself, touch becomes such a rarity. There's a startling invisibility that develops when you have nowhere to go, when you spend your days and your nights huddled for warmth in doorways and underpasses. You know you exist, can feel the cold and the hunger and the godawful loneliness of it all like a constant ache in your bones, but people never look at you, will notice you are there and look above you, away from you, straight through you.

Christmas Eve, six months of friend's couches when he can, dark corners and building sites when he can’t, he lines up with the other hungry of London. There are sandwiches and cups of soup. He isn’t hungry, but the rational part of his brain, small as it is now, tells him that he needs to eat, needs something to line his stomach, and free food is free food, and maybe he hasn’t quite outlived his student mentality. The woman who hands him his sandwich (turkey, cranberry sauce, some cheap cheese) barely looks at him, but there’s a man, the woman’s son, Simon thinks, same gentle eyes, who is serving soup.

He doesn’t wish Simon a happy Christmas, a trite offering when you have nowhere to go, but he ladles pumpkin soup into a thick cardboard cup and lets his fingertips touch Simon’s hand when he passes it over. For the first time in months, Simon makes eye contact with someone, feels the actual caring touch of another’s skin against his. There’s a murmur of, “Be safe,” but the line is shuffling along and Simon goes with it, back to the construction site that will house millionaires in a few short months. 

Simon doesn’t live long enough to see that happen, doesn't heed the stranger's warning. Christmas Day, he goes to Shepherd's Mass at the church down the street, catches the dealers on the corner as they come out for the day, and buys the hit that leaves him cold by Boxing Day.

 

* * *

 

In his second life, this strange new infancy, touch is terror.

He was told he wouldn't feel much, that the scientists couldn't quite figure out how to make nerve endings respond as they used to. Live again, just the memory of contact to see you through.

Certainly, though there had been fear, familiar with the thrill of it in his veins, physical pain had been dulled. What should have been unimaginable faded to a soft ache. Not even left with the sear of pain to distract from the psychological torment.

His Da flinches when he touches him; Simon doesn't blame him, doesn't begrudge him this, hates this new face and this new body and the cold skin, dead skin, can't look at himself in the mirror, smears his cover-up on blindly until there's enough that he can barely see the white of his face in his reflection.

Touch leads to abandonment, to isolation.

It isn't until he arrives at the dingy ULA flat that he discovers touch can be something different, can mean more. Julian embraces him, greets him as a brother. The others, gentle hands and smiles, bridging the divide and the distances between them, strangers who still greet him with dry, cold palms that flood his dead body with more warmth than he can ever remember. 

It’s no wonder, he thinks after everything has been said and done and atoned for, that he fell hard for the ULA. At the time, he never let himself see the similarities between the organisation and his first dealer, the bartering he was never a part of; do this deed, shoot this up, we will embrace you and hold you close and murmur baseless promises in your ear.

Amy is different, though, when she arrives. She touches him like the gestures are nothing, a gentle elbow to the ribs when she makes a joke, links her arm through his without a moment of hesitation or question. He waits for the punchline, for the inevitable request and repayment, but it never comes. 

The first time he puts an arm around Amy’s shoulders, casually, it sends a thrill through him. At once, it is both entirely natural and totally foreign. He half expects her to shrug away, to laugh at him, but Amy just looks up at him with her big, toothy smile, open mouth, and tells him to hurry up.

Whatever they told him at the treatment centre, the lies they had spread, touch in this strange new second life is more than he could have imagined. 

And when Kieren kisses him that first time, a revelation beyond all else, better than even the purest of drugs. For the first time in either life, touch seems like the most natural thing in the world, to kiss him back, to lift his hands and hold Kieren’s face, to brush fingertips, feather light, against the other man’s skin.

It becomes an itch he finds almost impossible not to scratch, always wanting to reach out, cover the distance between his body and Kieren’s, finds reasons to press skin to skin, just a fleeting brush of his fingers against the smooth white of Kieren’s wrist. Simon knows he is imagining warmth when Kieren touches his shoulder through layers of thick wool, but there is something else, still, magnetic. 

The moment his body collides with Kieren’s in the graveyard, past intentions be damned straight to hell, Simon is certain he can feel the thrum of his heartbeat passing into Kieren’s body.

After he explains his piece, two days where Kieren won’t come to the bungalow, doesn’t want anything to do with him, Simon thinks he is drowning. He subsists on memories of their first and only night together, so much skin against skin, no shame, just the purest of intent. He touches his own skin, tries to recall what the feeling of Kieren is like if his nerve endings aren’t real and he isn’t supposed to feel more than just the vaguest pressure when someone touches him. 

Then — Kieren in the doorway, snow falling, caught in his blonde hair, hands in his pockets, eyes and heart open. Apologies offered, forgiveness given, willingly. They reach for each other at the same time, and at once, the press of lips to lips, hands searching and frantic.

To touch, to feel; the path to rebirth.

Now he's warming up — at long last, maybe the homemade medication wasn't quite as effective as the ULA thought, maybe even dead his body’s tolerance is so high — touch is terrifying. To feel again. Only this time for real, not the makings of a sensation-starved mind, but the actual trail of Kieren’s skin against his, the careful, deliberate dragging of fingertips and lips in Simon’s most sensitive places, the crooks of his elbows, below his ear, down the newly healed skin over the notches in his spine.

Kieren had been pink cheeked (he has propensity to blush at the smallest of things, time together in bed sends the red flush down his neck and chest) for almost two months before Simon’s heart starts to beat again, no longer imagined. Simon had spent those weeks making sure Kieren felt everything he had missed out on in his first life, his cool tongue against Kieren’s skin, the simple press of palm to palm when they hold hands, the fleeting touches of lovers so comfortable around one another.

Now, Kieren says he has to make up for the time Simon has lost. His heartbeat is still a little sluggish, blood a slow pump through his veins, still running a bit cooler than most people, but after two lifetimes without feeling, just the barest graze of Kieren’s hand has him shivering, aching, desperate for more. Simon realises he can’t do with just a casual embrace, not from Kieren; he is starving, he is the man finding an oasis after walking the desert, he is the drowning man coming up for air.

So Kieren indulges. He spends hours searching the expanse of Simon’s body, new sensations, new textures. Somehow in his state, Simon manages to commit them all to memory, every press of a palm and tickle of Kieren’s hair, even as he struggles to find enough words to catalogue each sensation. 

(He manages, eventually, to distill it to some combination of “God” and “Kieren” again and again.)

They relearn the wiring of each other’s bodies, what it means to splay a hand against Simon’s back and what happens to Kieren when Simon uses his teeth. They learn more than Simon ever thought there was to know about another person, about how they work and how their bodies fit together. Simon learns nothing makes more sense than touching Kieren, than the feeling of skin against skin and mouth against mouth.

To touch, to feel. To love. 

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave kudos and comments if you liked it!
> 
> The bit about Simon going to church and then meeting his dealers was lifted straight from the movie 20,000 Days On Earth, in which Nick Cave talks of doing the same thing when he was on drugs. Simon would probably like Nick Cave, so it seemed only fitting.


End file.
